On June 17th and 18th, sponsored by Southern Weekend, supported by Southern Press Media Group, supported by New Oriental Public Welfare Strategy, and specially supported by China Post, the "Reading New Tinder" campus public welfare lectures have successively entered Chengdu Shude Middle School, Chengdu Shishi Tianfu Middle School High School and Junior High School. Liu Liangcheng, a writer and winner of the Lu Xun Literature Prize, gave a speech entitled "Listening to the Voice of Nature", which is now published as follows:
Liu Liangcheng in Rapeseed Ditch in Mulei Kazakh Autonomous County, Xinjiang. (Wang Shengzhi/Photo)
<h3>Nature that we have not perceived</h3>
It's 8 p.m., and we've just moved into this lecture hall from the outside, and one of the most important things is happening in the outside world. I don't know if you know it — it's just dark. It was getting dark, and it was dark at this moment.
We are in the midst of the greatest nature of darkness.
The sky, every day is dark, every day is bright, and we have no consciousness of it. At this moment, it is dark for human beings, and the sky of the tall trees on our campus, as well as the grass under the trees, and the sky of a small insect under the blades of the grass, is also dark. The sky of all things is dark.
This is the nature in which we live, and although at the moment we are sitting in the transparent light of the hall made by man, above the roof, above the stars, the endless sky is dark.
It's dark, such a huge nature, we ignore it, we don't perceive it. And the air we breathe all the time, do we perceive it? We don't.
Unless we live to the twilight of our lives, when we can't catch our breath, you will find that the air in nature seems to be thinning and decreasing. In fact, the air is still there, nature is always there, but your life is in the twilight years, you no longer need that air, so it is gradually decreasing, and when we say goodbye to the most ordinary air, we leave this world.
So, isn't it also natural to be born, old, sick and die? When one feels that one's mind is about to age, we know that we are in nature, that we are in the same nature as a worm, a dog, a bird that flies overhead. We all claim to love nature, we all want to feel nature, but do we really like nature?
All human behavior is telling us that man does not like nature.
How would you react if a mosquito buzzed and flew into the classroom and flew to your ear? Aren't mosquitoes natural life? This is one of the very few creatures among wild animals that can survive in cities where humans live. When it sings a beautiful song and flies before our eyes, our instinctive reaction is to slap it to death. When we shoot a mosquito, we are actually far away from nature. We say we love nature, but we selectively accept a part of nature, and see more and richer nature as our enemy, as objects that we can abuse at will.
When we say "nature," nature is opposite us, and nature is never ourselves. So aren't we natural? Aren't we human beings natural?
Nature is far away, in the sky, in the mountains, where we have not bothered. We all crave green water and green mountains. Whose home is the green water and green mountains? In the grass, above the green trees, it is home to birds and insects, and it is home to herbivores. Such a homeland, once people intrude, it instantly seems unnatural. If we go down with a single foot, we may suffer from a nest of ants; our shouting in the mountains may frighten many small animals. Our destruction and demand for nature has scarred the earth.
<h3>In nature, "ploughing and reading for the elderly"</h3>
Eight years ago, I bought an abandoned old school in the village of Rapeseed Ditch in Engelberg Township, Mulei County, Xinjiang, and built a college called "Mulei Academy." I work there to study for the elderly.
Rapeseed Ditch Village. (Courtesy of the author/image)
The so-called "cultivation reading" is a way of learning created by Confucian culture, thinking and learning in the course of work. This is the way Confucius taught us to learn. Confucius never gave big lectures or small lessons. His students are also all skilled, and there are few students who specialize in reading. They are practitioners from all walks of life. When students ask questions, the teacher answers, which is called "Zi Yue" and becomes the Analects. This is cultivation education.
The ancients did not have time to study for as long as we did in school. Each of them has a career for a living, reading is only a matter of cultivation, and the quest for the world and life makes them read, to think, to understand the world more deeply.
As for the elderly, although I don't look too old, I know I'm getting older. I want to grow old in nature like a tree.
The academy where I am located is full of towering trees. After living in the city for so many years, I couldn't feel the seasons, I didn't know when spring came and when autumn came. But in the academy, I could clearly feel the footsteps of spring or autumn. Every year in August and September, when the leaves on the big poplar tree start to yellow from the bottom layer, I know that summer has reached the end, and a season called "autumn" is coming. When the leaves turned yellow against the treetops layer by layer, and finally were completely blown off in an autumn wind, I knew that an autumn was overwhelmingly reaching the small village where I lived, to the vast Xinjiang where I was located, to the earth that was cooled by a wind blow. The cycle of the four seasons, such a huge natural existence, do we have perception? Autumn is coming who is perceiving and saying it?
More than twenty years ago, I wrote a book called One Man's Village. In 2012, an article in the book called "Chai He" was selected for the Sichuan Provincial College Entrance Examination Language Examination Paper.
This book is about a village in the distant nature, and I write about its day and night, one west wind after another blowing through the village, and those things that have been blown away by the wind are returned by the opposite wind after a long time. I've written about many naturally growing trees. Years later, I came to a village and sat under the poplar and elm trees that I had written about. Here I hear the footsteps of the years and feel that the years are coming day by day. On the hillside opposite the academy is a wheat field. When another autumn wheat is ripe, I know that autumn is coming, and a man has spent his first year in the valley where all things grow.
Such nature is in front of us, it is like an open book, who of us to read? Or we watch every moment, but who sees? Who feels it with their own heart?
Perhaps the man whose heart is full of autumn is old, but the next spring, a slope of green wheat seedlings will make him young again.
Literature is the way to approach nature
For thousands of years, our ancestors have created many ways for us to approach nature, enter nature, and understand nature through literature and art.
There are more than three hundred species of animals and plants in the Book of Verses, each with a name, sound, form, and color. One of the first things the ancients did to recognize or approach these natural beings was to name them and give them names. The first verse of the Book of Verses is "Guan Guan Ju Dove, in the River Continent". "Ju Dove" is the bird's name, and "Guan Guan" is its voice. This is a bird called "Ju dove", singing "Guanguan", and walked to us, which is the attitude of our ancients towards all natural things.
At that time, we were still in nature, and nature was all around us. We name each natural thing, call it with a name, and then use nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc., to bring a bird to life. When we call the bird with the "dove," we know it will understand and respond with a call.
In our traditional Chinese culture, nature is not the enemy we face, nature is with us, nature is around us, and nature is in our hearts. The "nature" that we present through literature and art has been nurtured by us in words for thousands of years, and we call it over and over again, and approach it again and again. The scenery of nature has long become our state of mind. Nature becomes the most vigorous growth in our hearts.
You have read Fabre's Insects, which is a scientific observation note that we read as prose. But after I read it, I thought it wasn't prose. It was the insect life of nature presented by a scientist with his own rigorous and meticulous observation. Despite the fineness of observation and the beauty of language, it is still not literature. Why isn't it literature? Because in Fabre's observation of all insects, we can't see the eyes of insects, only Fabre's eyes are probing the insect world, and there is no insect world looking back at us.
In Chinese literature, man and nature look at each other. "I see how feminine Aoyama is, and so do I see Aoyama." When we look at nature with our hearts, nature will respond to the beam of eyes that you look at it in thousands of ways, to the heart that appreciates it - this is our nature, which we have inherited from the era of the Book of Poetry, which we have passed on in literature, landscape painting and classical music. This is how we treat nature or know it.
Through literature and art, we have established a complete and approaching nature. Such an approach has been gradually forgotten in this era.
When we modern writers write about animals and plants, we rarely mention names. We write that all the people flying in the sky are called "birds", but it doesn't make any difference whether they are sparrows or crows or whatever, because we can't understand the world. All that grows on the ground is "grass", and the thousands of grasses and trees that were once named by our ancients with such beautiful names are now strangers to us. When we can't call out the name of a grass, we are already strangers to it, we can appreciate it, we can smell it, we can step on it. But it is the "nameless" in nature, and it has no name for us anymore.
The natural sciences have their own set of rigorous ways of understanding nature. When we read flora, we can find that every plant in nature can be explained clearly in one or two hundred words. But is that the plant that has been said in one or two hundred words of science is like this?
The writer said: No. In addition to the scientific understanding of a plant, there is a richer, human literature of plants.
A dandelion can be sent away with a hundred words of scientific language, but when a writer faces a dandelion, he may not be able to write it in a million words, and when one generation of writers finishes writing, another generation of writers will continue to write.
When the seeds of the dandelion with umbrella-like seeds are blown up by the wind and fly toward the distant sky, it takes away our hearts and our imaginations. Its wings are ours, its seeds are ours, and the strange places to which it falls are also what we aspire to. When another strong wind blows the distant dandelion seed back, falls back under the dandelion root, and grows again the next year, you can imagine how rich the world of such an ordinary grass has expanded our minds, this is the plant in literature, the animal in literature.
"Cherishing Nature" in Chinese Culture
Everyone learned in elementary school that "when the hoe day is noon, the sweat drops go down to the soil." Who knows the plate of Chinese food, the grains are hard." This is the simplest and most simple poem in Tang poetry, and it can be completely submerged in the many poems of the talented great poets of the Tang Dynasty, undetected and unread. However, the respect that this poem received went beyond the whole Tang dynasty poem, and it was read by generations of children.
Liu Liangcheng in rapeseed ditch. (Courtesy of the author/image)
When we read this poem, what are we reading? Isn't it nature? The grass seedlings on the earth, the sky and the scorching sun above the farmers' heads, the land where the grass seedlings grow, in such a heaven and earth, the farmers work with hoes, the sweat drops down, and the harvest is placed on the plate and tasted by us.
If you think about it, more than a thousand years have passed, and everything described in this poem has completely existed, and we read this poem as if we were reading a poem written by a poet today. The sky in the poem, the seedlings, and even the hoe that labored have not changed. The plate is still round, and the food on the plate is naturally rice or pasta and so on. Moreover, the labor we have to pay to eat this plate of Chinese food has not been reduced for thousands of years. As long as we walk on the land of China, walk in the countryside, we can see everything described in this poem everywhere. It is both idyllic and natural. Between heaven and earth, in this great nature, we have built our agrarian civilization. This civilization is born by heaven, and heaven is the greatest nature.
I published a book four years ago called "Talking about The Things of the Earth to Heaven," and I said Chinese there's a word called "chat." Who does "Chat" talk to? Talk to the sky, not to people. Our habit of speaking is that every time we say a word, we always feel that there is a listener on top, and it is called "heaven".
Although we are an agrarian people, all we do is on the ground, and "facing the loess and facing the sky" is our norm. But if the sky does not help, if it does not give a smooth weather, all the labor on the ground is blind, this is our destiny. We will look at the face of heaven and live the days on earth, and we will rely on heaven to work on the earth to get the harvest.
What is this "heaven"? It is nature and what Chinese call the "Tao."
For thousands of years, our ancestors listened to the sound of heaven with their ears up, to the sound of all things between heaven and earth. This kind of listening allows us to establish a complete system of Chinese culture.
Just look at the "Twenty-Four Solar Terms". That's the node of the weather change. We've been watching the sky. Looking at the sky, we compiled a guide to our living and farming on the earth. Look at the sky and know what to do on the ground. This is our nature.
We are in nature all the time, and our minds have been shaped by nature for a long time. With a natural heart, live in nature and live as a part of it. To pay attention to nature is to focus on oneself.
Liu Liangcheng